Category: Uncategorized

. . . of last time is the buyer’s ethical responsibility to embrace the seller and help extend the seller’s skills and reputation. If that’s the flip side, then my last rant must have been the flippant side, noting how resentful and impatient we are with a seller’s shortcomings, whether real or assumed.

The urge to encourage and cultivate a seller is part of the relationship model that Doc has been championing along with many others. During the period between 40 to 1 B.C. (Before Cluetrain), we assumed that commerce is simply commercial, with buyers and sellers doomed forever to terse, often adversarial salvos. We might call that communication mode expedient. The long decline into mass marketing and the muting of the customer’s voice had caused us to forget about the market conversation, or to conduct it sotto voce at best.

Then the Internet clued us that the market is a conversation and money is just the punch line.

Doc reports that, soon after the ink dried, the Clue Trainers started hearing from people whose cultures had not lost the art of transactional conversation. They pointed out that real markets are more than conversations, they’re relationships, crafted one conversation at a time, often over decades and generations.

When we realize that markets are relationships, we can recognize that Iraq’s Sumerian ancestors invented written language, not to record their ancient myths and epic poetry, but to keep track of market conversations and the relationships developed out of them. At first they were anecdotal, like blogs are today. They evolved like blogs, getting more efficient, connected and data-like until an Italian friar named Fra Luca Pacioli invented double entry bookkeeping in 1494. In a very real sense, double entry bookkeeping was the XML of the Renaissance. (Are the “o”, “k” and “e” double-entered in “bookkeeping” just to get the point across? How weird is that?)

We need to be clear: Literature, Ethics and Law are the products of explicit recorded history and explicitness is the enabling technology of market relationships. Like VisiCalc jump-starting personal computing, public markets were the killer app that jump-started money and writing and literacy. Without public markets, trade isn’t robust enough to support anything more than ad hoc barter. The agora requires standard pricing of a commodity to act as a medium of exchange (probably grain in Mesopotamia) and writing to support the market experience, where you barter your pig in the morning for grain or shells or coins and then barter them for a rabbit, maize, mead, a trinket and a little hashish to make it all seem worthwhile. When everyone uses the same barter good, it’s money, no matter how it’s styled.

The agora was surrounded by cafés, foundries for written philosophy, politics, laws. John Bosak famously said that “XML gives Java something to do.” Writing gave Hammurabi, Homer, Plato, Aristotle and Solon something to do.

We didn’t need literacy to teach the youngsters in Ur about Gilgamesh. Epic poetry retold around the hearth did that more effectively than books ever would. We needed writing only to record explicit market relationships:

<grain_deposit>Farmer Hotep deposited 40 bushels of high quality grain in the South Baghdad Granary on the 4th day of the 8th moon of the 7th year of the reign of Shalmaneser III.</grain_deposit> Indeed, the first business forms were Cunei-forms; the first data platform, wet clay; the first data managers, priests (we still think of them as priests, which is how they like it). The data was as closed and proprietary as it gets: Farmer Hotep could no more get at or read his record than you can get at or read your Homeland Security profile. The development of agriculture implied, even demanded, markets and markets imply a thin-client form of literacy, just as TV implies illiteracy, email and blogs imply mass literacy and, I would argue, XML implies, even demands, Open Data.

Agriculture was the watershed organizing force that institutionalized slavery and accounting. Daniel Quinn suggested that the Garden of Eden Myth started as the recounting of a barely remembered hunter-gatherer utopia in the lush Fertile Crescent before farming and climate cleared and desolated the middle east.

Explicating the Implicit

As Ross Mayfield noted, it’s often good to be explicit. In the case of transactions, Cluetrain gave us a context to be explicit about market conversations. Bloggging tools set us up to record and archive our thoughts and, collectively, to archive our market conversations and suggest their progeny, relationships. What will give us the context to describe and implement market relationships on a global scale? Let’s review the evolution of markets (warning: non-researched vague impressions formatted to look authoritative):

Cultural Phase	Activities	Pricing	Data	Mode
Hunting & gathering	1. ad hoc barter	haggle	oral	relationship
Agriculture	2. public market	haggle	oral+	relationship
Mercantilism	3, retail (via distribution)	fixed*	closed	expedient
Mass media	4. retail, mail order, QVC/HSN	fixed	closed	expedient
E-Commerce	5. [4]+ web brochures & review sites	fixed	closed+	softened expedient
Cluetrained	6. [5]+ data websites + blogs	fixed	closed+	exp/conversation
Peer Economy	7.  commerce-blogs	satisfaction	open	exp/conv/relationship
* after John Wanamaker

If that’s how trading and markets evolve, then we can guess that they evolve to the next stage when the old modality can’t scale to meet the requirements of a new cultural phase. Hunter gatherers accumulate no more than they can haul around, and they meet very few of each other. Farmers build granaries and farm-to-market roads and highways and cities with sewage systems. All of those imply coinage and accounting as soon as bartering won’t scale to the newly expanded marketplace.

Farmers notice that tea kettles develop a lot of pressure, but they don’t do anything with that knowledge. When steam is harnessed, trade routes proliferate, as cotton is moved to the mills in bulk and loomed into cloth to be worn by the newly employed and tightly scheduled loom operators whose wages buy the cotton. (“Got no time to haggle now, I’m late, I’m late, I’m late!”) Haggling on small items won’t scale to an industrial pace, so John Wanamaker instantiated fixed pricing in the 1880s, as Saturn did for cars in the 1990s.

The expedient mode scales great as long as the one-to-many model of clerk-based retailing constrains buyers’ choices. But when media frees sellers from the clerk-based low bandwidth model to the high bitstreams of broadcast, many more sellers are selling to many more buyers. The broadcast model may be one-to many, but the seller model is many-to-manymore. Early e-commerce, we know, is just brochureware, so nothing really changes until data driven web sites and email and web logs open an electronic feedback trickle rising to a bit torrent.

That’s where we are now, on the cusp of a peer economy. P2P transactions may look like data-backed blogs talking about commerce, like this example. A global market as intimate as blogging is a major disruptor. Should we be surprised that this era’s masters are fighting our current scaling crisis without really understanding it? Why should they be any different than their precursors at previous inflection points, movers shaking at the prospect of a new mode for transactions?

Sweet Home, Ali Baba

So here we are, the newest, least subtle culture, back in the Tigris-Euphrates valley where it all started, just as our economy is emerging from the cathedral’s gloom, blinking in the bright light of the global bazaar. Obsessing about Iraq and antiquities and cuneiform records and all the rest, reinventing the divine chaordia of peer-to-peer market relationships mediated by value and quality and with asynchronous time enough to care about those arcane, . . . well, qualities. The super market’s goods scaled to suburbia but they really weren’t goods, just OKs. They were less filling and worse tasting than fresh New Jersey tomatoes and Iowa farm-raised beef. The mass market is re-learning how to spell q-u-a-l-i-t-y and we won’t let mass merchandising put our genie back in their bottle.

Now we have all three communication modes at our disposal: Expedience, Conversation and Relationship. We don’t want to haggle over commodities but we’re experts in prestige and the tools of our trade and we want the good life at great prices. You’ll find us over at CostCo, loading paper towels into our Mercedes. Next we’ll stop at CompUSA, grooving to our iPod while stocking up on commodity CD blanks to Rip Mix Burn on our tricked-out iMac. Back home, we’ll order cut-rate printer cartridges from inks4art.com since CostCo and CompUSA only stock the Epson parts.

In a few more web years we’ll order our ripe red beefsteak tomatoes direct from Doc’s second cousin in Jersey and marbled beefsteaks from ripe red Gelbvieh cattle on Dick Gholson’s farm in Mt. Pleasant, Iowa. (If current distribution systems won’t scale, someone will scale them for us. Maybe UPS will buy Mail Boxes, Etc. Ya think?)

How will we know about those tomatoes and steaks? The same way we knew about them in the bazaar: Reputation. Reputation, that evanescent characteristic owned by everyone except the person it’s attached to. Reputation, the secret sauce of a decommodified life. Reputation, the public knowledge that’s too important to be left to private data.

Clue the Data, Maestro

We’ve not yet developed a clued-in context to help us talk about open data as A Good Thing, or even why it might be. Aside from anecdotal web sites and blogs (randomly linked but otherwise disconnected), there is no user-centric open data yet, where relationship information, reputation, is threaded and mirrored in the mind/data spaces of the seller and the buyer. Consider this stunning fact: There is still no example of public, open data.

Big companies insist on mirroring data for their B2B transactions, often using the EDI protocol or the more pervasive my_lawyers_vs._your_lawyers protocol (FYTP). They can afford the effort to 1) agree to agree, 2) explicate the agreement, 4) staff for compliance and 5) go to court to weasel out of or enforce the agreement. But you and I don’t have that luxury and we can’t compete with mass merchandisers interpreting our data for us, constrained by business models and data architectures that can’t scale to the public forum.

Corporate Agoraphobia

Companies hate public scrutiny as much as agoraphobic hermits hibernating year round. They would never conceive of open data along the Xpertweb model so data for the rest of us is a job for the rest of us. The Internet and FTP and email and the web was built by clued individuals who proved it could scale
enough for enterprise. WiFi was built by clued individuals who proved it could scale enough for enterprise. Closed data has proven it can’t scale to the Peer Economy, so it’s time for some clued individuals to create open public data for the rest of us, where you own your record of our relationship and I own mine and if they’re identical, everyone knows the record is valid and so the reputations we build out of our relationship are valid.

What might fuel such a profound shift? What’s even more powerful than companies’ behind-the-scenes collusion, haggling, defaults and legal maneuvering? Publicity, and its dependent, politics. Publicity is literally openness.

Openness trumps legality, PR, accounting, advertising, good intentions, pricing, litigation and every other mechanism that convinces us it’s a good idea to buy over-hyped commodities and sell an hour of our time for $20 so the company can resell it for $60. A single email may be enough openness to bring bankers down who once would have moved quietly on to another firm to do it all over again. When reputation data is too broadly distributed to be hidden and too obvious to be spun, we’ll have recaptured the User Interface enjoyed by generations of traders in the stalls of Chaldea, relating to generations of customers, teaching the world how to serve the customer and the bottom line.

Like any relationship, it’s a two way street. Gradually we’ll remember how to be great customers, embracing and extending seller’s customization skills, relating through authentic conversations and coaxing each other into the peer economy, one expert at a time.

1:28:57 AM    

Many threads are woven into the Xpertweb meme. Like most of us, I’m prone to remember poor service longer than good service. I’ve found, though, that outstanding service is so welcome that I want to tell my friends about it, like great art, which it partly is. By noting great service, I also reassure myself that I’m not yet so jaded that I have to wear my old fart lapel pin.

FWIW, I’ve been conducting an experiment for several decades. Regardless of the service, tip the cab driver generously on the way to the airport and you’ll never be an airline statistic. The warranty does not extend to your luggage.

Unfortunately I mostly notice poor service. For many years, I was a reasonably successful real estate developer. Since we contracted to build things, we were always a heartbeat away from a contracting meltdown that made the Money Pit look like a doghouse with crooked siding. About 1980, I was building a shopping center and construction had not started well. Haranguing the pleasant but somewhat lackadaisical contractors wasn’t helping. I walked into the construction shack one morning and immediately sensed that something was very wrong.

“Guys, there’s something wrong here.”

“Whaddaya talkin’ about?”

“I’m not sure. Something’s missing. Give me a minute.”

I looked around and suddenly I got it.

“Holy Fucking Shit! There’s no calendar! You guys are running a $4 million job without a fuckin’ calendar! Where are you from, the Moon?!”

It was true. A wall calendar, the essential enabling technology of project management, was missing. This was unheard of, as improbable as a Texas Republican building an insane deficit while gutting the Bill of Rights! Even the lamest contractor had a pin-up calendar from Snap-On, LJB Pipeline or Tarco Construction. Like, you had to work at not having a wall calendar!

Meeting Mania Intervention—The 12 Steps to Sobriety

Meetings waste more time than any other activity. Most groups would be better off with a Wiki. Most Wikis would be better with less conversation and more explicit promises. Do you suppose that explains the success of Open Source? It’s a huge operation that never holds a meeting.

The only reason to have a meeting is to find out what everyone’s doing, what they should be doing and when they will work on what they should be doing. Many organizations I’ve worked for want more technology, but often the best thing I teach them is how to have a meeting. It’s actually simple:

1. The meeting leader takes the minutes with a note pad and a laptop.
2. Everyone says what’s on their mind.
3. Everyone will propose solutions.
4. Ask who’s going to actualize the solution.
5. Note who’s willing to do something and when.
6. Outline the tasks, people and dates.
7. Print and distribute the outline, requesting follow-up at the next meeting.
8. Now starts the back-tracking:
   1. “Oops, I forgot I’ll be out of town this week”
   2. “I just realized it’s more complicated than I thought”
   3. “I’ll need Mary to help me”
9. Record the changes and re-distribute the outline.
10. 2 days before the next meeting, send the outline to everybody.
11. Bring enough copies to the next meeting for everyone, since many will forget it, hoping you will.
12. Repeat. Allow six weeks for behavioral change. In Europe, allow six weeks for behavioural change.

That’s it. Published promises galvanize productivity. If you do nothing more than list them, you’re ahead of 99% of the world’s workgroups. Xpertweb forms automate that process.

No frickin’ calendar? Sheesh!

10:35:18 AM    

I’m down for the dinner Doc and Haley are planning on May 1, my favorite date. Here’s why.

I once helped a friend establish a trust company. One of their clients was in his late 80s, was terminally ill and looked it. He was spending the last spring of his life fine-tuning an already well-crafted estate plan. It seemed like a terrible set of priorities to me.

On May 1, 1993, he shuffled into the office with a gleam in his eye and asked rhetorically,

“Do you know what we can say today?“

He grinned at our cluelessness:

Hooray! Hooray!
The first of May,
Outdoor screwing starts today!

He was dead by fall.

2:07:01 PM    

Actually, I may be the last person to learn about Andrius Kalikauskas and MS Labs. Andrius is a passionate guy with undergraduate degrees in math and physics and a physics PhD. Andrius was introduced to Xpertweb by Mitch and Flemming as a person who is interested in reputation systems. Since they are Xpertweb’s secret weapons, their recommendation ensured that he would be involved.

Andrius’ larger concern is thinking itself. Most people don’t realize that thinking is a tool so they don’t treat it with the objectivity they might use when shopping for a computer or Sawzall. The tag line of MS Labs is “Do you care about thinking?”

Flemming riffs on thinking:

Thinking is one subject I’m really interested in. Our ability to think abstractly is one of the key traits that define what a human is. Yet we seem to have little clue how we do it, or how we might do it better. Our future depends, of course, on what choices we arrive at, individually and collectively. And yet, most of us don’t have any better strategy than picking the strongest thought that appears in our head, or our stomach, or wherever it appears, and assuming that this is our answer. Without examining where it came from, and without having the faintest clue as to HOW to think.

The presence of that quote in this post is an example of Andrius’ work. He organizes and juxtaposes important points of view among his MS Labs members. I’d seen the quote before, but might not have found it again without seeing it in the MS Labs members’ feed. Logically enough, the MS discussion group is called “Thinking Relevantly.”

Relevance is the first service Andrius is performing for Xpertweb. Another is to help organize willing hearts and minds to help with the coding and rollout. Andrius is pressing Flemming (actually, himself and Flemming…;-) to have working code on May 23, for demonstration at the BlogTalk conference in Vienna. That’s what Andrius does, he catalyzes innovation.

Andrius and Flemming are both driven to take the broadest view possible when starting a project, questioning every assumption and bias. Combined with Mitch’s dogma-killing crusade, Xpertweb is reasonably protected from blowing smoke up its own ass. All three of them know that the most dangerous force in developing a new protocol is one’s own assumptions and biases.

Half a Loaf

Here’s an example of how Andrius is questioning our assumptions:

[A list of] references – kind words, frustrations, evaluations.

http://www.ms.lt/en/work/references.html

My wish is to see what initiatives are out there, help them find
synergy, and build a “web of references” so that people are better able to hook up their efforts. Right now I’m just spitting the pages out of a little database on my laptop. I appreciate more data! Flatter yourself! or somebody you care for! It should be something that’s posted on the web.

A key feature of this system is that the data is excerpted from the web, that is, it is data “in context” so you can see why those kind words were spoken, or learn more about the initiative. It’s the power of overhearing people speaking. It also lets people farm the information that helps them present themselves, which seems only fair and helpful.

Partly I’m doing this for my work on http://xpertweb.com because I’m trying to show the importance of practicing with a real live system and seeing what kind of uses trigger self-sustaining participation. Already> it’s helped me understand the data breakdown between initiatives and references, and the various kinds of each. So that will be important in defining data elements.

Partly I’m doing it because I need to sell our lab’s team building services and I realized that these words seem very convincing, as at the bottom of http://www.ms.lt/team/ Even the frustrations seem informative.

Partly I’m doing it because I think its been long needed in order to get anything done. I’d like to use a web of references to back up Tom Munnecke’s work on “uplift pattern languages” specifically applied to helping HIV/AIDS orphans in Africa. http://www.upspace.org

I appreciate all kinds of feedback, and also data, and especially ideas on how this might be put to practical use. At some point, too, it would be nice to put the database itself online.

When you go to the references link, you see entries like this:

Minciu Sodas

kindword… Benjamin, Leon on 4/2/2003 about Minciu Sodas: This is excellent material – I’ve been lurking here for some time and reading with fascination. In the coming weeks I’ll be sharing a new concept with the group called iWork based on Dee Hock’s (Visa) chaordic model – watch this space.

kindword… Bruk, Ian on 4/2/2003 about Minciu Sodas: I guess the one thing I didn’t mention is that Minciu Sodas, through Andrius mostly I think, has my trust. That is a big thing in my mind. It’s just how to develop that?

kindword… Pillai, Bala on 3/28/2003 about Minciu Sodas: How about us considering having our mindcosms working as a union? — a tighter minds parallel of the European Union? Assess what Minciu Sodas’ comparative advantage in strengths and resources are , ditto for APIC Mind Colonies and conjoin the two better? Us rowing in the same direction but focusing on difference inter-connectible aspects — like a ship going in the same direction but key minds within the ship are taking charge of different functions.

You’ll find 14 sets of these kindwords on the page, demonstrating why Andrius is so valuable. I picked a series of three at random, and discovered something about non-explicit reputation systems when I rea
lly examined those three sets of kind words. Notice that the last one is a suggestion classified as a kindword. Although it’s the only such case among the 14, it points to the problems inherent in a non-explicit system.

Like blogs, kindword/frustration/evaluation comments can be helpful but they share a failing we’ve discovered about blogs, which is why people are trying to leverage them into knowledge management systems: non-explicit, anecdotal text is quotable but otherwise unusable. Here’s a report just in from Jason Calacanis on how his company’s venture capital database overtook the previous market leader, which was a blog about venture capital:

That is the big lesson I think.. blog + database + research reports = big business, blog plus nothing = a hobby. (author’s emphasis)

Reputation is too important to be a hobby.

If I’m looking for a Java programmer for a particular solution, and I need it by Tuesday, how do I use the accumulated kindword entries to find the perfect programmer? I want the kind words, of course, but I need quantitative ratings and average rating reports and numerical comparisons that act as pointers to help me get to the these little blocks of text. All of that info might be available elsewhere, but surely it will be captured on the site of the person with the reputation, (or in an RSS feed) so, that I can click on a link to an order form as soon as I’m satisfied that I’ve found what I need. The Xpertweb approach is to require the buyer to provide the kind (or not) words and a number grade (01-99%). Then we can look at all the Java programmers who have sold n or more tasks involving, for example, graphic representation of numerical data.

The operative word is require. A reputation system is worthless if it captures ratings only at the whim of the buyer, or worse, at the whim of participants in a forum, as in this example, where the comments do not necessarily relate to a particular task. They can be too vague to benefit the next customer. Therefore it’s imperative to require that a grade and comment be recorded within a specified period after presentation of a completion report or invoice.

Pulling the String . . .

Have you ever had one of those projects which seemed simple, but once you got into it, you discover non intuitive requirements embedded in your initial enthusiasm? Such a discovery is like pulling a string out of a sweater. Actualizing the Xpertweb meme is a little like that.

Here’s what happens when you think seriously about a useful reputation system:

1. The central form, a Completion Report or Invoice. (form 1)
2. In order to capture a grade and comment, there must be a contract in place to require the rating, presumably in an order form. (form 2)
3. The order form is really 2 forms, the order plus a buyer authorization to proceed. (form 3)
4. There’s often give-and-take between the buyer and seller to arrange scheduling, delivery details, etc. The parties can do it over the phone or email, but since we’re building forms anyway, why not provide a little subroutine for negotiating the details? (forms 3a & 3b)
5. There’s nothing explicitly required between buyer acceptance and the Completion Report or Invoice. It’s useful to provide a Remarks Form, initiated by either party. (form 4)

Fair enough, those forms could be designed in an afternoon. But there are other considerations. Once completed, where should their data be stored? Today, such information is kept by the seller. Naturally, the seller will yield to the temptation to excise the unflattering remarks. The data could be kept on a central server, but then what happens to reputations built through blood, sweat and tears if the central servers go out of business? It’s not like the W3C is gonna store this info for us. Just as bad, any centralized system may not scale as needed or worse, is corruptible, as described in the HumanTech Parable.

The only answer left standing is that both the buyer and the seller must keep the information, which must be identical to be valid. That means that both parties must have a web site with space and programming for the reputation system. Ratings so mirrored are demonstrably valid. If there’s any divergence, the ratings cannot be presumed to be valid.

The ratings are only useful if subsequent users can access the reputation data. Conventional wisdom says the data should be a mySQL data base with a CGI. Then, of course, each user would need an XML-RPC or SOAP routine to access reputation data from all the other sites. That’s a load which is sure to overload the requirement for user-maintained data. (Visionary doesn’t have to mean stupid–there are some experts who think Xpertweb is silly enough already!) The obvious but counter-intuitive answer is to post all data as pure XML in plain sight on each user’s Xpertweb site with known paths to the data.

And it doesn’t stop there. Our little Xpertweb engine (the little engine that might) needs to help its users describe specific products, like a customized PHP-MySQL shopping cart or mowing a 20,000 sq. ft. lawn. Once described, that product data must be accessible as a product page, and the product itself must have a reputation built around it. When someone needs their drain fixed, they’re not really looking for a plumber, they’re looking for a fixed drain.

That’s almost the end of our little string, so I’ll spare you the rest.

Freeing the Horse

As Doc reported on Thursday, these requirements seem implicit if you’re serious about a useful reputation system, sort of like seeing the horse in a block of marble and removing all the marble that doesn’t look like a horse. In fact, as Doc also related, a useful reputation system seems to me to be implicit in the XML spec. Though enterprises seem to be using XML primarily as a serialization routine (like SOAP) to connect legacy data systems, XML is fine as a data format, if you’re willing to live with its verbosity.

As a data format hosted on a web server, XML is readable by search engines, a skillion parsers and certainly by a thin-client purpose-built script like the one we’re building for Xpertweb. We’re even on the cusp of a promise dormant since the spec became a recommendation in February, 1998: An XHTML page can contain explicit links to bits of XML data and, without any programming display linked data when the page is opened. XML is truly data for the rest of us, because it frees us from CGI programming and the hidden data that only CGIs can talk to.

Internal Combustion

All those moving parts seem obvious and necessary if you’re serious about a useful reputation system. If there are any shortcuts, we’d love to hear about them. We have recurrent internal debate on whether all these moving parts are necessary, typically when a new teammate signs on, as in Andrius’ case.

I see a reputation engine as a kind of internal combustion engine. Even if it’s a two-banger, you still need quite a few moving parts to get it to turn over. I think we have a pretty good design and built-in means to re-engineer it while it’s running. That’s why I welcome dogma slayers,
but note that there’s more to a reputation engine than it seems at first.

10:21:44 PM    

Mitch and I are doing a little hobby consulting with Allen Searls, Doc’s son. Are we surprised that this Searls is also smart? Doc says Allen is a lot smarter than he is. Well, doh. He’s smart enough to be in his 20s.

What’s hobby consulting? It’s when you have a little experience and a lot of mileage, and you help out someone with energy, promise and a good mind. Unlike regular consulting you don’t get paid and you don’t tell your client what he wants to hear but rather what he needs to hear. (Actually, I now tell clients what they need to hear, which is why I don’t have as many clients as I used to, but they stay in business longer.)

Allen has developed a live expert solution called GlobeAlive, the World Live Web. The participants on the site use a built-in chat tool to augment email as a way to connect to an expert immediately, which is the gold standard of using expertise. Mitch and I are helping Allen develop the site along conventional lines and also preparing it to act as an Xpertweb infomediary for the benefit of Allen’s participants. Here’s Allen describing his unique value proposition:

There may be a deeper parallel between the mission of GlobeAlive, which is to create a search engine of live people, rather than websites, and the mission of Identity, which I believe is to create a data set for each individual on the web that automatically tells advertisers, companies (and perhaps other people in general) what they’re interested in and more importantly, what they’re not interested in. That definition is probably completely off base, but as a starting point it may work to complete this thought.

In it’s most abstract form, GA intended to help do for people what the Internet did for information. Right now, if you want a piece of information, you can use a search engine and get it, thanks to the web. But if you want a person? The WWW links websites, but it doesn’t link people. Not really. If I want to talk to a person, I have to go to chat rooms, or find out a phone number/email address/Yahoo ID, etc. But how do I know in advance who I need to talk to? I only know the type of person I need to talk to. There’s no way to just punch in a keyword and find the right person– except for perhaps dating sites, but that’s not the idea. The idea is that the internet might be a better place if everyone online had a profile of keywords (or any other form of data set), etc that they chose to describe themselves/their product/service, etc. Then their contact information, whether it’s chat/phone/email could be found through a search engine when people punch in their keyword(s). Of course, one of their preferences in such a profile could include whether or not they’d want to show up in such a search result at all.

But if someone is selling a product or service, or would like to meet people that share one’s precise set of interests, than it would make sense to be in the “people’s” search results. GlobeAlive has already used this model to make a “chat engine” so that anyone who is available for chat on the search topic at hand shows up in our search results. However, this same keyword profile or an adaptation of it could be used for other purposes like Identity is proposing, such as alerting advertisers/companies of what one’s real interests are.

It’s amazing that Allen “got” this Identity and Presence thing so long ago, and developed his own chat engine, within GlobeAlive, to connect his participants.

Compare the GlobeAlive service to my conception of ideal support and expertise:

The Problem with Silicon-based Solutions

There’s not too little software, there’s too much. All the enthusiastic do-it-yourselfers who want to learn and explore new applications and scripting languages and preference panels have already done so. How many apps can one person master? I’m a maven with about a dozen software apps and conversant with another couple of dozen, but I feel incredibly incompetent when confronted with a software issue.

In the 1970’s, every new piece of software was new and compelling. Perhaps because there were so few of them. It’s like wiring your stereo. It starts as a receiver and 2 speakers and morphs slowly into a component system – you’re able to grow your dendrites at the same rate as the system. But software got away from us a long time ago.

So I’m as put off by new software as I am by late model car engines. The investment of time and energy in a new app seems like just too much hassle.

You know what I want? I want Commander Data. I want him in my coat closet, using no resources until I have a question and then he activates, solves my problem and goes back into stasis (he might be expletive-activated and then expletive-deleted). Because he’s Commander Data, he does everything almost immediately, so I’m willing to pay him a lot per minute.

I’ll bet that’s what you want too: an expert on the software you’ve got, not more software for you to be inept with.

Carbon-based Solutions

My Commander Data exists, but he’s in the form of dozens of skill sets, each possessed by thousands of people whom I could IM or web to, if I knew how to connect with them. For every problem I’ve got, there are lots of folks who are as good as Commander Data for that specific problem and who would be happy to help me out, especially if paid, say, $1 per minute.

Sometimes you find them at help desks, but rarely, and the irritation threshold is just too high there. I need an index of “amateur” experts with proven track records who are available immediately for high per-minute rates which I only pay when I’m satisfied, which means they have to be confident that I’ll be reasonably satisfied. So we also need a reputation engine in addition to an expert index. They need to be “amateurs” for the same reason that the best bloggers are amateurs.

With a decent market for instant expertise, more than software support becomes available. I’ll find wizards at Excel who can whip up an analysis by noon that would take me ’til Memorial Day. So why would I buy Excel? There will be online bookkeepers who’ll make my copy of QuickBooks irrelevant. Etc. and so on. Customers for expertise are not customers for software. If you’re in the software business, this is a nasty vision, but what other outcome is more likely? We know we’ll figure out how to link up consumers with experts who know how to do the things that software publishers wish everyone would like to learn.

If this vision is correct, the software industry will find itself at a crossroads as dicey as the one faced by the RIAA. How many experts are needed to do the specialized tasks of, say, a thousand people? Way less than a thousand. Do companies want their people struggling with Excel analyses when they can outsource the expertise for a fraction of the allocable resource costs? Your guess is better than mine, but from here it feels more like the Dreamweaver market than the MS Of
fice market.

Maybe the answer is Xpertweb. When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. From here anyway.

10:08:55 PM    

Doc points to my Spin Country entry but pushes back a little, noting that corporate propaganda may be less now than it once was, scrutinized as it is by fact checking bloggers:

“I’m not sure it’s worse now than it ever was. In fact, I think it’s better. One measure: common as they are, the number of press releases chasing me in the world has declined since Cluetrain came out. Of course, that may be because I’m one of the four last people you’ll want to send a press release if you’ve bothered to read the book; but still, it seems indicative.
 
Plus there’s the plain fact that you’ve got a quarter million or more stringers out there, calling bullshit on every specioius source that rears its flacky head. After awhile that has to have an effect.”

I agree. Also, as I put this and me to bed in the early morning hours, I felt the post was a little cynical:

“The brightest, most ambitious employees can’t afford to work for a living. They need to hold jobs for a living. Sure, they’d like to work for a living, but they need to do what best secures their families’ futures: their careers. And what builds careers? Expectations build careers. Track records don’t build careers, mentoring doesn’t build careers, innovation doesn’t build careers.”

I went over the top there, since most people in organizations do the right thing and work hard at doing it better. But the grain of truth is that they work for top-level managers who are forced to generate impossibly optimistic intimations of breakout possibilities, in an arms race against competitive optimism to try to get a little respect from jaded analysts (at least the analysts they don’t have in their pocket). I don’t see a conspiracy here, just the unfortunate maneuvers of people who do sorry things because they feel they need to.

The Fix is In

What’s shocking is the pervasiveness of cynical, amnesia-based representations by companies, governments and religious folk. Amnesia-based in the sense that it relies on the public’s tendency to be so busy with their real lives to track and check facts, but rather to respond to the tone of the representations it sees and hears, rather than the underlying, fairly obvious realities. Our memory seems about 3 months long and shrinking. It’s as if managers, politicians and evangelists believe their own PR and then, like a kid caught in a fib, feel forced to extend and embellish misleading statements to make them big enough to be believed.

No Way Out

The most obvious example of this disconnect is practiced by Karl Rove’s White House, Praising soldiers while cutting veteran’s benefits, cheerleading education while cutting school budgets, Deriding Big Gummint while designing the biggest deficit in history.

Our Attorney General, the Cop of Our Land, is on the record advising his people to overtly violate the Freedom of Information Act. Who’s going to prosecute them? It’s like a police cruiser parked on the sidewalk in front of Krispy Kreme.

It’s disgusting when corporate chieftains and evangelists violate our trust, but we can sell stocks and boycott products and worship elsewhere, precious freedoms all. But notice a cynical disconnect in the integrity of the leaders of the land, and you’re told to Love it or Leave it.

Bad news fellas, thinking people are here for the long haul, and our collective memories are long enough to notice lies and resurrect the truth.

1:57:18 PM    

Speaking of the Spin Problem (below), If Google labels a press release as news, will there be any difference between spin and news? Here’s a little design exercise that shows what a long lever arm Google has become. We start with how bad its current policy is, and imagine how it might help make journalism honest again.

Dan Gillmor, Dave Winer,  The Register and many others have objected to Google’s treatment of press releases as the same as news. Google’s well-received Beta News service lists a press release as a peer to a news articles if both are returned by the same search argument. This is A Bad Thing, especially since it’s so hard to tell the difference anyway. But could Google turn the tables and increase its stature with a simple algorithm?

What we know:

• Google knows which sources churn out press releases, and could easily identify any press release by the standard format taught in Press Release 101.
• Google can compare text better than anyone else.
• If it chose to, Google could categorize and track all press releases.
• If it chose to, Google could append a styled “PR” next to every press release found in a search.
• Google could also identify what portion of a “news story”, published by a so-called news source, is derived from a known press release.
• If it chose to, Google could append a statistical measure to every news source with PR content,
  (like, “95% PR“, or “75% PR” or “33% PR“)

Presto! Google becomes part of the solution and exposes how little of “news” is newsworthy.

12:46:38 AM    

Why has the rise of the Web coincided so precisely with a decline in organizational candor? Obviously I don’t blame the web, but I wonder at the coincidence. By organizational candor, I’m thinking of the alignment of what is said by corporations and religions and companies, compared to their actions. Whether it’s a company, a government or a religion, it seems that a marketing mentality has co-opted the organizational agenda.

This disconnect is what the Cluetrain guys were describing:

“Corporations do not speak in the same voice as these new networked conversations. To their intended online audiences, companies sound hollow, flat, literally inhuman.”

Have you heard the old saw that a man’s blood supply is insufficient to support his brain and penis simultaneously? Likewise, perhaps, there’s just not enough energy in an organization to talk the talk and walk the walk.

Our Future Economy

Not the economy of the future, but an economy obsessed with future outcomes. That is to say, outcomes which have not yet occurred. That is to say, outcomes which are not in place, as in nonexistent. We think it’s great to be forward-looking, working on emerging technologies and inventing the future. But organizations seem to spend so much effort describing their impending triumphs that they just can’t match their projected image or meet the inflated expectations that they so casually broadcast.

Perhaps it is the Internet’s fault. Perhaps it’s always been like this and the Internet has exposed a traditional disconnect which was not obvious before. However, there’s another suspect. Some time in the 1990’s, the quintessential corporate obsession became stock price rather than intrinsic company value. And stock price is all about unexpected good news which the SEC calls “Forward-looking statements”. These statements have even perverted formerly reliable statements like “the company will“:

“The Company and its representatives may from time to time make written or oral forward-looking statements, including statements contained in the Company’s filings with the SEC and in its reports to shareholders. One can identify these forward-looking statements by use of words such as “strategy,” “expects,” “plans,” “anticipates,” “believes,” “will,” “continues,” “estimates,” “intends,” “projects,” “goals,” “targets” and other words of similar meaning.”*

Aha! Now we’re on to something. Corporations must maximize their stock market valuation so employees who do the things that raise the stock price are valued above all others. Now let’s consider what really drives stock prices. Do we think it’s by doing the right things that build a solid company and better social values? No, that’s just the spin. The market discounts all the information it already has, whether it’s product news or war news, as Mitch Ratcliffe observed on April 9th in Wreakonomic Reality:

Saddam’s statue topples and the Dow closes down 100.98 points, off 1.72 percent for the year. The predicted rally on the heels of a rapid “victory” in Iraq hasn’t materialized (now we’re in for months of internecine conflict and a slow dissolution of the “new Iraq” as the U.S. moves on to the next crisis — see Afghanistan for details). The long run-up to war kept growth subdued and now we’re seeing the impact in lowered guidance from companies and rising national debt and trade deficit s. In other words, war isn’t a magic elixir for the economy and we still have to face reality, that a lot of basic block-and-tackling of fundamentals needs doing. This from the New York Times :

” The market has been absolutely thrilled about an imminent end for arguably (these) first three weeks of the war. We started the stock rally before the war started,” said Arthur Hogan, chief market analyst at Jefferies & Co. “Unfortunately, when investors stop celebrating they will have to focus on corporate profits, which may not be so jubilant,” he said.

Profits. Those often ugly realities which, we know, companies will attempt to counter with marketing to the stock market, spinning the analysts, pre-announcing products not ready for prime time and all the other insubstantial maneuvers meant to divert the world from that pesky challenge called profits.

The Hard Work of Holding a Job

The obsession with brightly painted futures is not confined to the executive suite, it permeates organizations. The brightest, most ambitious employees can’t afford to work for a living. They need to hold jobs for a living. Sure, they’d like to work for a living, but they need to do what best secures their families’ futures: their careers. And what builds careers? Expectations build careers. Track records don’t build careers, mentoring doesn’t build careers, innovation doesn’t build careers.

What builds careers is the constant expectation that you will make things dramatically better, with the emphasis on the dramatic part. And that’s the problem.  Practical, workmanlike solutions are not dramatic enough for a spin-based economy. No, if you want a meteoric career, you’d better come up with whopper ideas, transformative re-structurings, mega deals and impossibly complex global initiatives that are never proposed by the conventional, unimaginative people whose horizons are limited by the realities of operations and the fact that there’s no such thing as a resourceless task.

What if things don’t work as planned? It really won’t matter to your career, because you’ll have moved on to your next grand vision. The disconnect between the grand plan and the sad reality won’t be apparent until you’ve applied your magic to an even bigger opportunity in some other division or subsidiary or, more likely, moved up to corporate where your positive attitude and strong convictions give hope to an even higher level of credulous cheerleaders.

Nope, none of has met a bubble we didn’t love, in a company or in the market. For those with the best backgrounds, prospects and handshakes, bold initiatives are the path to corporate stardom, with a remarkable strain of company amnesia about what happens to the grand plans 3 years later, when the shooting star of your career is riddling another operational illusion.

What Doesn’t Work

There’s a lot of ritual in business. We do things because it’s unthinkable to not do them, even if there’s no evidence that they make much difference. Consider Marketing and sales. When we consider the billions of dollars spent on advertising, we glimpse a naked emperor.  Maybe there’s some huge cohort of the population that we’ve never met that is highly impacted by ads, but I haven’t met anyone whose buying decisions are actually impacted by most advertising. If my premise is correct, it’s because there are three kinds of purchases, habitual, important and trivial.

1. Habitual buys, like detergent, cereal and corporate OS decisions.
   (A kind of dogma that Mitch described in his important article, The Invisible Dogma.)
2. Important buys, so crucial we blow right past the ads and do our own research.
   (which, thanks to the web, is easier than ever)
3. Trivial buys, based more on shelf position and coincidence than ad awareness.

I know, there are far smarter people than I who have proved time again that advertising is effective and crucial. I’m just reflecting my experience and that of people I know. Do you suppose those studies were done by people with a vested interest? Maybe they’re just more spin, since a lot of careers are counting on advertising. Don’t pay attention to the detail that the only ads with measurable effectiveness, Web and email ads, are so ineffective as to be laughable.

The other thing that doesn’t work as advertised is selling. Don’t take my word for it, ask Jerry Vass, author of Soft Selling in a Hard World. Jerry is paid a lot of money to teach highly paid account execs to string together the right words to close sales. He will tell you that only 52% of sales are the result of selling. The remaining 48% involve salespeople, but may be subject to the same three limiting factors as advertising. Here’s Jerry’s assessment of most experienced salespeople:

Company Secrets

Experienced salespeople lack the skills to present at the boardroom level because they are unable to explain:

• your firm’s sustainable competitive advantage
• your unique selling proposition
• what business you are really in from your Client’s point of view
• how your service fits the Client’s business
• how your service is different from the competition
• the results your service delivers in the Client’s terms
• why your service is worth your asking price
• why you are defenseless in a price negotiation
• why you are surprisingly difficult to buy from

And here is the kicker: Your salespeople don’t know that they don’t know and leave half their business undiscovered and unsold.

So if marketing doesn’t work and selling doesn’t work, how do we explain all the business that gets done? We are, after all, running a robust economy here, even when times are slow. Maybe it’s because we’re all in the habit of buying stuff from each other, and we make our peace with whatever level of quality our research leaves us with. Maybe competitors spend about the same amount on marketing and sales and so it looks like it’s as necessary as sponsoring a tennis star or golf tournament. But I think it’s because top executives like to hobnob with celebrities.

What we do know is that if a company quotes a study, we assume it’s been rigged in ways we can’t analyze. If the government says a new law is good for us, we assume it’s beneficiaries have prepaid its sponsors. If the Catholic Church or the Air Force Academy says that sexual abuse is rare, you know that a lot of innocents are being taken advantage of.

Spin gives you motion sickness and our society is looking a little green around the gills.

12:16:39 AM    

You may have heard about the LA Times’ discovery that one of its war photographers had photoshopped a couple of images together “to improve the composition.” The Times summarily fired him and several bloggers have been wondering how much of the rest of what we see is fake. (Login name and password = “useless”)

Tim Bray writes,

“This really raises a deeper issue: are photographs, in this digital day, useful evidence in establishing the truth? I think they remain useful, here’s why.

Just a few days before the war started, there was a demonstration in San Francisco that got ugly and the police ended up arresting a lot of people. There wasn’t much news coverage, and I was poking around a bit to figure what had happened. It turns out that Lisa Rein had posted a whole bunch of video of the event, which I watched, but can no longer find on her site, although she’s got lots of other demonstration footage.

What really impressed me about the video, aside from how unhappy the cops looked, was the incredible profusion of recording devices in the crowd. It seems like every second person had a digicam or videocam or something; a thousand little bright silver flashes of digital memory.

Now suppose that one of the demonstrators or one of the cops or a passing motorist had had a psychotic episode and someone had ended up dead. The evidence from any one of those digital devices, turned in the next day by an attendee, would be essentially useless. But if the crucial events were captured independently by two or three (and it’s pretty obvious that they would have been), then if someone was trying to doctor the evidence you’d know, and it’s easy to believe that the digital record could be a major help in establishing the truth.

That is to say, at the same time as the advances in digital manipulation technology make any one instance less trustworthy, the increasing ubiquity of digital recording technology more than compensates.”

It looks like Tim is describing the proliferation of ubiquitous PFRs–Personal Flight Recorders, unobtrusively streaming our captured video to our private repository and sharing them at will:

If you can spell S-O-N-Y, you know what’s around the corner:

• Picture Phones will become Video Phones.
• Video Phones will be connected into the wireless mesh.
• Audio/Video capture will be unobtrusive, separated from the phone as the microphone is today. (We’ll be stealthy without being sneaky)
• Copyright holders won’t like it, but we will have the right to capture anything we witness.
  (another of the many things they don’t like about the future)
• We will replay and share any part of our personal history we choose to.
• Within n years, more people will have PFRs than not.

On the same theme, Ming blogged yesterday about a Salon article by Sheldon Pacotti. Pacotti is properly concerned about the surveillence society enabled by Constitution-bashers like the little bible thumper Ashcroft, enabling an industry of people whose job is to watch us:

“The computer-networked, digital world poses enormous threats to humanity that no government, no matter how totalitarian, can stop. A fully open society is our best chance for survival.”

Ming concurs:

“Yeah, I agree. There’s really no way of stopping it, so we need to expand our collective ability to solve problems, our collective intelligence, at least as fast as the speed that new technologies are developed at. The author talks about various sectors of society where governments might think they ought to hold on to all the knowledge. Like, surveillance. If there are cameras everywhere, do we trust government agencies with deciding what to do with what they see? No, of course not. If there has to be surveillance, the only safe thing is if it easily available to all of us.

” If we must submit to a surveillance society, I think it is clear that an open network, in which no group, agency, or individual is privileged over any other, would lead to a society with a superior character than one in which the citizens remain separate from and observed by the government. Better for us all to be able to watch one another than for the “authorities” to monopolize this power and leave us with only the fear.” (Pacotti)

Although Flemming goes on to follow Pacotti’s concerns about the spread of “dangerous ideas” like nanotech and nukes and gasses, but I’m most interested in the vision of a surveillance industry so overwhelmed and outclassed by the collective record that it has no useful product to sell. Sorta like a guy on the street corner peddling an 80/20 nitrogen/oxygen mix.

Peer Brother is Watching You (from 2/15/03)

That inevitable future may seem bleak, but perhaps only because we haven’t got our head around the effect of decentralized peer-based surveillance. Intermediaries always act contrary to the interests of those for whom they intermediate, so we assume that a video-archived future is through corporate and government surveillance serving the interests of those powerful enough to control the “public” record. That is not what Peer Surveillance will be like.

We cannot predict what shape the Peer Surveillance culture will take, but there’s ample precedent. It will probably  be like a small village where everyone knows everyone else’s business and gossips about what’s most aberrant. Historically, the intrusiveness of busybodies varied inversely with the population of the village. With the whole world capturing the activities of, well, the whole world, maybe we’ll become more tolerant of our peccadilloes as they become so common that they’ll be uninteresting, like chair-throwing on Jerry Springer or hot-tubbing on reality TV.

Perhaps the most chilling effect of the Peer Surveillance culture will be on guilt and whining. We may find that the sins and guilt we carry with us are simply not that rare, outrageous or, worst of all, interesting. Perhaps then we’ll learn to be of real use to each other, and productivity will be the norm rather than the burden of the overtaxed few.

Take Away: The PFR is a HUGE watershed change. We will all be visible, obvious and accou
ntable, not to Big Brother, but to each other. Digital accountability trumps anonymity and is likely to impose small-town values on urban communities. The accountability meme will seep into our thinking and may inspire us to be civilized without having to be religious. As real-life cause and effect becomes as common as reality TV, we’ll discover together that things actually do make sense and don’t require superstitious thinking.

 

10:34:20 PM    

From Europe a week ago, Flemming wrote on the subject of “Original Affluence.” Quoting Marshall Sahlins, who, in The Original Affluent Society, described what Ming calls “gift economies and how pre-historic economic systems weren’t as miserable as they’re commonly believed to be“. In addition to the current assumption that wants are always greater than the means to satisfy them, Sahlins says:

“But there is also a Zen road to affluence, which states that human material wants are finite and few, and technical means unchanging but on the whole adequate. Adopting the Zen strategy, a people can enjoy an unparalleled material plenty – with a low standard of living. That, I think, describes the hunters. And it helps explain some of their more curious economic behaviour: their “prodigality” for example- the inclination to consume at once all stocks on hand, as if they had it made. Free from market obsessions of scarcity, hunters’ economic propensities may be more consistently predicated on abundance than our own.”

Flemming goes on to say,

“Sahlins explains how typical hunter-gatherers work 3-5 hours per day on acquiring food, and they have plenty of time for leisure. For that matter, they have a schedule that most civilized people would be sort of envious about. The more ‘civilized’ we become, the harder we tend to work, and the less time we have for leisure. He also makes some interesting distinctions between primitive living and poverty. In hunter-gatherer cultures starvation would be pretty much unthinkable.”

“The world’s most primitive people have few possessions. but they are not poor. Poverty is not a certain small amount of goods, nor is it just a relation between means and ends; above all it is a relation between people. Poverty is a social status. As such it is the invention of civilisation. It has grown with civilisation, at once as an invidious distinction between classes and more importantly as a tributary relation that can render agrarian peasants more susceptible to natural catastrophes than any winter camp of Alaskan Eskimo.”

Call Me Ishmael

This was well depicted in Daniel Quinn’s Ishmael which described the life of a Mountain Gorilla as a little like living in a candy store, where the gorilla would absent-mindedly stretch out his hand and it would rest on some delicious green shoot. Quinn suggests that the Garden of Eden is a primordial species memory of how life was before the few locked up the food to sell it to the many and called it the miracle of agriculture.

So pervasive is our presumption of primordial want and brutality compared to modern wealth and satisfaction that we can’t recognize what is obvious. In a hunter-gatherer society, whether foxes or gazelles or people, the resources are in perfect balance with the populations. Unless the ecosystem is undergoing one of its rare rapid changes, the population fluctuates a little around its ability to find food. Like a thermostat, a little excess leads to a little adjustment, which may not even be noticed. These are animals and people who have lived their lives bundled up in winter and sweating in summer with a stomach rarely as full as ours is three times a day. So they do not expect, or want, anything else. Every one of them kills a lot of creatures during a lifetime, but is only killed once. Without a highly developed sense of the future or social entitlements. That single death may have little sting.

Could we ever hope to regain a hunter-gatherer mentality and affluence model? I’ve often fantasized that Xpertweb might be in some ways a parallel. If your reputation is your marketing and guaranteed satisfaction a way to close more sales, you may find customers guided to you by your excellent ratings in your area of specialization. That would make you more a gatherer than a hunter. Like Amazon, orders would come in at a rate close to what you can handle, because if it’s less, you’ll master other skills better suiting your talent. Or if you get too busy, you’ll tap your skill at finding Xpertweb help to subcontract work to, confident in their proven ability. And you may train others to help you fill the enthusiastic market.

Consider Flemming’s conclusion:

“I’m not sure what we can learn here, other than that it is possible to successfully live very simply and modestly. There must be some kind of point that applies also to a technological civilization. A just-in-time kind of thinking. We could very well arrange our world so that nobody ever has to starve and so we only work a few hours per day. From what I hear, only 2-3 percent of our work relates to actual production, and from my own observation, the majority of human work is inefficient or unnecessary, just arranged to keep people busy. So, why can’t we have a an efficient and productive, but leisurely and relaxed, high tech society, where it would be unthinkable that basic needs wouldn’t be filled?”

A Lever Long Enough to Move the World?

Ming’s got Xpertweb on his mind as much as I do, so perhaps he’s glimpsed the same possibilities. He’s clearly noting that most people don’t work for a living, but hold jobs for a living. If we’re less than 10% on task, what happens when we’re 20% on task for each other and spend the rest of our time off the meter? A cornucopia never really dreamt of. Interesting that 20% of a 12 hour day is close to the 3 hours that hunter-gatherers like to put in.

Of course that cornucopia won’t deliver us to the Zen state that Flemming and Marshall Sahlins and I admire but have not achieved (well, one of us hasn’t). However, it opens the possibility of release from the expectation of deprivation and want. And there’s nothing more Zen than letting go of fear.

Have you noticed that the peace protests and more enlightened seeking happens in affluent areas? Maybe you consider those expressions too new age for your taste, but there are a lot of people working out a new reality so dramatic that it’s been called, collectively, the second superpower. Like the ancient Athenians, the common ground of people seeking a better world is relative affluence, not scraping by. Instead of slaves, we’ll have each other, amplified by elegant electronic levers that Archimedes could never imagine.

12:27:49 AM    comment [commentCounter (119)]